Negotiations for the sale of Moonton Technology from ByteDance to Savvy Games Group have entered a new phase, according to
Reuters, bringing the Gulf kingdom closer to another major acquisition. According to journalists Yantoultra Ngui and Kane Wu, the sale price is now under discussion and is said to exceed 6 billion dollars, confirming renewed momentum in a deal that had remained uncertain for several months.
On November 27,
initial reports from
Bloomberg indicated that ByteDance had reopened talks with the Saudi Public Investment Fund subsidiary. At the time, discussions were described as preliminary, slowed by PIF’s financial allocations as it prioritized domestic infrastructure projects such as Neom.
The jump in valuation, from 4 billion dollars at the time of the 2021 acquisition to more than 6 billion today, is driven by the strength of
Mobile Legends: Bang Bang. The title has maintained organic growth in Southeast Asia despite a broader slowdown in the mobile MOBA market and the competition from Honor
of Kings. In January 2026, the M7 tournament, the equivalent of the Worlds in
League of Legends, recorded a peak viewership of 5.6 million, ranking second in terms of Peak Viewers, behind LoL and ahead of major titles such as
VALORANT and
Counter-Strike 2. With that performance, MLBB also set a new record for a mobile title, surpassing
Free Fire’s previous peak, further strengthening its position in the negotiations.
For ByteDance, the sale marks the final chapter of an unsuccessful diversification strategy into hardcore gaming. After restructuring Nuverse, publisher of Marvel Snap, and divesting several projects to Tencent in mid-2024, the Chinese group is offloading its last major in-house development asset. The cash injection is expected to heavily support its R&D investments in large language models such as Seedance, as well as the infrastructure required to sustain TikTok.
For Savvy Games Group, acquiring Moonton would align with its recent expansion strategy. While the group already owns tournament infrastructure through ESL FACEIT and casual game studios such as Scopely, it recently secured close to 94 percent of Electronic Arts
for $55 billion, publisher of
EA Sports FC, Apex Legends, The Sims, and
Battlefield. The deal would allow Saudi Arabia to control a new segment of the value chain of a major esports ecosystem, from game publishing to tournament operations, while also securing a title that has been downloaded more than 1.5 billion times worldwide.
